My Notorious Life (44 page)

—F*** you. Unsavory? Is that what you call it?

—I don’t call it that, no, he said, weary of me. —But the law does.

—The law is a steaming HORSE pile, and you know it.

—Wouldn’t it be easier to have a simple midwifery practice? Charlie now grew animated, his eyes lit. The more he warmed to this new idea, of my partial retirement, the more suspicious I turned. —Listen to me, Mrs. Jones. When you are released, you’ll practice as a happy midwife who only delivers healthy bouncing babies and dispenses only certain medicines and procedures but not others related in any way at all to the premature—

—Don’t YOU say what I will do! Only I can say when to close my doors.

—Confound you! You said just now you would retire! You claim you don’t want the LAW on you. Make up your mind! Retire or don’t retire. I throw up my hands. I can’t live like this.

—YOU can’t? Live like what?

—Like a man whose wife is in the quod, whose daughter cries for her mother, whose house is run to ground by lazy servants in mutiny.

—My heart bleeds for you, said my hotheaded self.

—Our daughter cries for her Mam. She crawls into her bed at night and holds your pillow and says it smells of lilac scent like her Mamma, and—

—Stop it! I roared. —You only rub hot salt in the cut. You think I forget her? Not one minute passes I don’t think of her.

—So you will retire. If you don’t—

We stood staring livid at the shambles around us.

—So help me Axie, when you get out of here, if you return to practice as you did before, and you are trapped again, and sent away—

—What?

—I won’t forgive you. You think I enjoy to have my wife in jail?

—Yes! I think you enjoy to do as you please and frolic with Millicents and—

He went to slap me. He raised his hand and it hung in the air, our dark chandelier of mistrust. We two was beat down and snarling thanks to the laws of Merritt and Matsell and Hays, the cunning of Applegates, the lies of Dixon. We was supposed to be warriors in a battle but no, it was a battle between US. Not a Grand Cause, but only mistrust and jealousy, the dirty currency of the sexes always.

Slowly his hand sank down. —Every night, Axie, I curse the forces that took you from my side.

—You only curse those forces because the business suffers without me.

He winced. —The business does not suffer. Even while you’ve been in here, Madame DeBeausacq has sold more than six thousand dollars’ worth of medicines. Just in the mail. Just in a month’s time.

—How about that? Six thousand for sitting in a cell.

—So the business is fine, he said, —while the rest of us—the rest of us are not.

—Then get me out. Get me out why don’t you? I turned my back to him, my blood in an uproar. —It seems I’d have done better to jump off the roof of the train onto that prairie long ago when I had a chance, I said, and wept bitter into my bare hands.

This torrent was enough, it seemed, to extinguish what fire remained of my husband’s anger. —Aw now, hush, he said at last. —We’ll get you out.

And he came up behind me, clasped my rigid waist with the tines of his fingers meshed in front. His face rested by my unyielding neck, his lips at my ear. His breath made the hackles rise along my spine. —It’s your birthday soon, my sweet, he said, —and I have a present in mind for you.

—In your mind? A lot of good it will do me there.

—It’s a surprise. He said this with honey, so I known what he was after.

—Is it a key to this door?

—I promise. You will be vindicated at court. Don’t worry. Shh, now.

His hands traveled along the rungs of my ribs, over the terrible drab mungo of my prison dress. And then he began.

To kiss my neck. To whisper, Ann. Annie. Axie sweet.

—Don’t.

—Why not? His voice was a burr against my skin, the hard bone of his jaw clamped along my clavicle. He nuzzled in hard against my cheek and took the lobe of my ear in his mouth.

Delicate readers will turn aside now to avoid an indelicate scene. But to tell it is to save it for my private self, for proof of how it was with us. How fast he turned me. Confused me. Handled me and pulled me by the waist,
by the lips. —Get off, I says. —Get away. He pressed on, the fabric of my wretched dress tenting back with the force of his knee between my knees, and I fought him off.

—Why not? he whispered. —Why?

—You b*****d. Get me out of here, I said, and pushed him.

He grabbed the shanks of my arms and pulled me against him so greedy and sank me down upon the feathers and there I was turned again. He kissed me and his breath was caught in my mouth, combustible.

—No, I said, my tongue lost and tangled. No. The guard would come. The door would open. We’d be discovered. The shame of it. The risk. —The matron, I says.

—Afraid, are you? he whispered. —Afraid, right? You won’t, right? Why not? Come on. Come on Annie. He was baiting me. Circling. Stroking. Baiting me. —That’s it. Thatta girl now. His caress. His whisper. His taunts. Soundless we was wild things, and even despite the danger, the cringe of depravity, my fingernails raked the bare skin of his back beneath his shirt, stuttered over the knobs of spine. His fingers was laced through the long hair at the back of my head, and then in a maneuver of his knee, the wrestle of his arms, he lifted me over him. Mother of God. How he loved this, the unholy surroundings. A drip of ooze down the wall. The words Lord Help Me scratched by a wretch on the stone. Color swirled darkly on the inside of my lids.

My husband pulled at my jailhouse garments and pushed them aside. —Afraid? he whispered. —Chickenheart, are you? He flipped me flat to the bed with no noise except for the rough breath of his craving. He’d show me. Sure he would drive his point home so he would, so I’d know the force of his needful passion and power and how these twin engines of his manhood couldn’t be stopped and to be perfectly honest I had no intention or wish to contain him but lay angry plus ecstatic, afraid of the matron, the clang of metal on stone. It was panic now and a thrill of desperate craving. Dear God the key would turn in the lock. I helped with the buttons of his trousers. —Hurry, I said. How slow he was. How clumsy. I hated him. —Love, he said. The guards would be at us. It was dirty, it was delirium, the danger and the smell of him, shaving lotion and tobacco, a taste of sour apple, salt of blood where his lip bled, or mine.
Like hot bitters in a whiskey burn. Was that keys rattling in the hall? The boots of the guard. —Ssht, I said. We stayed still. My heart careened in my chest.

Charlie put his mouth to my ear. —I’ve paid, he whispered. —Fifty dollars so they’ll not disturb us, I paid her off. Like I was a piece of trade off the street, how it excited him.

—You paid? I cried. —You paid you c***s**ker.

—I did. He drove at me and lifted me to him. —Love, he said, and I believed him, the b*****d was right it could not be helped, that force you could not arrest it or hold it for bail or contain it, not in prison or nowhere. He paid for it, a quick fifty. My own money. He bribed the guard. With a feel and a kiss he had turned me and yes I was right there with him. —Charlie, I said, with a gasp. My throat was thick with hatred of him and love. We were married. How needy he was the way he clung to me, like he could transport us far off from this terrible oubliette, till with a great shudder he rested so I was safe in his arms for the barest of moments, and then he stood to rearrange himself, to go and present himself again to the clear unfettered air outside my brutal cage.

*  *  *

A week passed, and he did not visit again. I had no word of him. All those days was another typhoid of jealous memory. I paced my cell and bit my lips so they turned raw. Half the time I thought Madame DeBeausacq could fry in jail for all I cared but I, Axie M. Jones would go home to my darling little one and never hear that name DeBeausacq again. Mostly though, I wanted to boil my enemies in a vat of lye to bleach their bones then run them through the mangle and hang them flapping from the line. I was punished for no reason.

And sitting there reproachful was the letter to the
Herald
Charlie had left for me to sign.
Defend yourself.
For days I ignored it. Then at last in a fit of fury I picked it up.

“While the MEN are not prosecuted, the LADIES suffer in jail . . . ” Charlie wrote that. Ha. Defend yourself, he had said. It seemed, on that bleak day, that nobody else would. So I picked up my own pen and wrote more on the page.

Given the true facts of Miss Shackford’s case, don’t I owe it to myself and my family, and to some very dear and true friends, and to the ladies of New York City who adhere to me amidst all the clouds of malignity, and also to that public who scorn persecution and injustice, to point out the lies of your newspaper? The charges against me have no merit, and I will be vindicated at trial.

Sincerely, Madame J. A. DeBeausacq

With no help at all I wrote out the whole thing, including Charlie’s part about how
Ladies die in ordinary childbirth every day,
and signed it, and got the little guard Elsie Reilly to mail it to the
Herald
for me. Thanks to my advice and medicines, she had swole up in the family way and went about advertising me amongst the inmates and the wardens as an expert on female physiology, so that even in that wretched boghole I could not give up ministering to females on the topic of carnality, and all its attendant woes. Meanwhile, the
Herald
would have my letter, and them bungers could put their own b***s*** in their pipes and smoke it.

*  *  *

On a May day, Charlie arrived again in my cell, pleased like he hung the moon, waving the newspaper with my letter published in it, bringing me correspondence from Owens and Morrill and blue flowers from a hydrangea bush.

—Where were you? I cried.

—What else do you think I have for you?

—A writ of release, I growled at him, —or else get out.

His face fell. —If only it was such news. But instead it’s your birthday present.

—My birthday? Was it?

He reached behind my ear and withdrew a chocolate, and then again under my shawl and withdrew a roll of paper tied with pink satin lace and handed it to me with a flourish. —Many Happy Returns of the day, Mrs. Jones.

—Twenty nine years old, I said, —and buried alive.

—Just look.

I took the ribbon off the paper and it unfurled before us. It was a drawing. Blue ink on blue-stained paper. It showed a house like a palace. Four stories tall with walled gardens and a carriage barn. Archways and columns at the entrances. Finials on the grand posts of the staircase, on the rooftops. Curlicues and flourishes around the windows.

—What is this? The picture startled me, the way the house sat there like a queen in all its beauty, so fancy and expensive. I wanted it.

—Behold the House of Jones, Charlie said. —The land is bought and paid for.

I beheld as instructed, disbelieving. All orphans dream of home and for Charlie and me this was the drawing of a dream. The house in the picture had three chimneys. Three doors. Forty windows. The rooms were named, each one for a separate purpose. Salon. Library. Conservatory. Ballroom. Boudoir. Office. My finger traced the blue lines of ink on the paper, like veins under my skin already. How I wanted to live there.

—Say something, said Charlie, smiling away. —It’s your house.

—You have always been a wild-a** cove with no more sense than a barnacle.

—We’ll live there in peace and luxury. We’ll have a grand ball to welcome you home where you belong, Mrs. Jones.

—If them baboons ever let me out of here.

He took out his handkerchief and pressed it tenderly to my eyes while I wept. It smelled of the sweet wide world outside.

—The land’s at Fifty Second Street and Fifth Avenue.

—It’s a cowpath, I said, afraid it wouldn’t come true. —The middle of nowhere.

—Not for long. Archbishop Hughes is raising Saint Patrick’s Cathedral two blocks away. He wanted the land for his own residence but I outbid him. Won’t he love to have Madame DeBeausacq for his neighbor? He has denounced her already, from the pulpit. She’s more notorious than ever.

Small comfort, to be denounced by an Archbishop, because at that moment I was not on Fifth Avenue riding in my carriage, but spending my birthday in a festering boghole. Our household was falling apart without me there to manage it. The appointments kept knocking with nobody to help them. And what of Annabelle? Charlie reported the child had taken
to sucking her thumb and refused to go to school because she was teased there, for her mother’s infamy. The governess had quit because of her tantrums. The piano teacher wanted a raise. Charlie said Greta had suddenly married a man named Alfonse Sprunt, a brewer from Yorkville, and it seemed she was as fond of his pilsners as she was of his kisses, for she had been at her desk drunk on several occasions and often came to work late or not at all, suffering her dark moods without a joke and a laugh from me to cheer her up. When Charlie scolded her she had told him she expected a bonus wage for running the office single-handed.

—Greta only cries and carries on complaining, said Charlie. —I’m apt to fire her if she keeps at it.

—Don’t you dare.

—And what should I do about it, then?

—Get me out you b*ll*cks.

—I am doing my best, you pure devilment of a harpy, you know I am.

These were our dire days of feuding and grudges fueled by terrible circumstance and the bad faith of Judges. I waited for relief, through the spring and the turn of the weather, when the temperature in the Tombs reached a hundred degrees, and we females slowly cooked in the stewpot of the law that some called justice but I called s***.